What a turnaround the campaign in Tunisia had brought, he remarked. The final surrender of German and Italian troops was expected momentarily, and might possibly number over 150,000 men—perhaps even a quarter million.8 The invasion and subsequent combat had thus provided the Allies with the safe learning experience they needed. Its sequel had been decided upon at the recent Casablanca Conference, the President recapitulated: namely “operation HUSKY,” the invasion of Sicily, which he hoped “would meet with similar good fortune,” as the Allies made ready to throw “every resource of men and munitions against the enemy” under July’s full moon.9 The chiefs were assembled now, however, in Washington, to review what should happen after the fall of Sicily: “What next?”
With that, the President asked Mr. Churchill to give his own introductory remarks.
It was a delicate moment.
Churchill’s lengthy tour d’horizon in the President’s study, delivered with his characteristic rhetorical flair, bons mots, cadences, and flattering flourishes, certainly impressed his listeners for its brilliance (“very good opening address,” General Brooke noted in his diary).10 However, it completely failed to dispel the U.S. chiefs’ fears of what the British were plotting. With every word, in fact, it became clearer that, whereas the President had seen Torch operations in the Mediterranean in 1943 as a means to gain the vital battle and command experience necessary for a cross-Channel Second Front in 1944, the British were not so confident—indeed, were not seriously interested in crossing the Channel anytime soon, unless the Germans collapsed. Thus the U.S. chiefs were compelled to listen as the Prime Minister lyrically described the triumph of Torch and the imminent conquest of Sicily as the means to a much richer, more byzantine, strategic end: not the defeat of Germany but merely the further clearing of Britain’s vital seaway to India, and a staging post for expeditions into the “soft underbelly of Europe,” beginning with the knocking of Italy out of the Axis coalition.
Before the assembled generals and admirals, Winston Churchill proceeded to outline how, surely, it ought to be the objective of the Allies, after securing Sicily, to invade Italy, obtain its surrender, then exploit the huge gap this would leave in the Adriatic and the Balkans, where twenty-five Italian divisions were currently helping the Germans in Yugoslavia. Once Italy fell out of the Axis alliance, those Italian forces would be hors de combat—offering an even softer European “underbelly.” If, in turn, the Turks saw such a door into southern, mainland Europe opening, they might be persuaded to join the Allies or at least be encouraged to permit the Allies to use Turkish positions and airfields in order to attack the Third Reich from the south and southeast—thus disposing of the need for a cross-Channel operation at all, unless it were to be conducted as a pro forma operation, following the “collapse” of the Germans, similar to 1918, after the “defection” of Bulgaria.
1918?
Bulgaria?
There was a deathly hush in the Oval Office. Admiral Leahy, as chairman of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, was caustic in the entry he made in his office diary that evening. “The prime Minister spoke at length on the advantages that would accrue to the allied cause by a collapse or a surrender of Italy through its effect on the invaded countries of the near East and Turkey. In regard to a cross channel [Second Front] invasion in the near future,” the admiral added with ill-concealed disgust, “it is apparently his opinion that adequate preparations cannot be made for such an effort in the Spring of 1944.” Such an invasion, Churchill had allowed, “must be made at sometime in the future.”11 Sometime—but not 1944.
Even though Admiral Leahy, Admiral King, General Marshall, and General McNarney (deputizing for the literally heart-stricken General Arnold) had all been told by Field Marshal Dill to expect something on these lines, they still found themselves speechless. That Churchill would openly contradict and defy the strategy laid down by the President of the United States and agreed to at Casablanca, in front of the President and to his face, before his top military advisers, seemed incredible. “There was no indication in his talk of a British intention to undertake a cross channel invasion of Europe either in 1943 or 1944,” Leahy repeated in frustration. In order to be quite clear as to the Prime Minister’s precise argument, he added that the Prime Minister was recommending that no such invasion take place “unless Germany should collapse as a result of the Russian campaign and our intensified bombing attack.”12
No cross-Channel invasion, then, even in 1944, unless there was a German collapse.
All eyes thus turned to the President.
To General Brooke’s irritation, the President contradicted the Prime Minister. In the nicest yet firmest way possible the President made abundantly clear he did not agree with Churchill’s new alternative strategy. “The President in a brief following talk,” Leahy noted, “advocated a cross channel invasion at the earliest practicable date and not later than 1944.”
To the relief of the U.S. chiefs of staff, the President explained that, in order to make certain of success in mounting a spring 1944 cross-Channel assault, U.S. operations in the Mediterranean must be curtailed as soon as possible after the fall of Sicily. The Allies would by then have all the command and battle experience they needed from the Mediterranean—in the air, on land, and at sea—for a Second Front invasion from Britain. In combat skills, in field command, in coalition planning and fighting, and in logistics. Mr. Roosevelt therefore categorically “expressed disagreement with any Italian adventure beyond the seizure of Sicily and Sardinia.”
The President’s tone had now turned from warm politeness to firmness. With regard to the Far East, he made clear he was disappointed by the latest British refusal to carry out the Anakim offensive that had been agreed upon at Casablanca, and stated “that the air transport line to China”—which Chiang Kai-shek was pleading be intensified—must “be placed in full operating condition without any delay, and that China must be kept in the war.”13
With that, the strange meeting in the President’s study came to a close.
Brooke, in his diary, was alarmed, noting the President “showed less grasp of strategy” than the Prime Minister.
The two top military teams then filed out. As the chief of staff to the Prime Minister, General Ismay, later recounted, “there was an unmistakable atmosphere of tension” and “it was clear there was going to be a battle royal.”14
28
No Major Operations Until 1945 or 1946
EVEN CHURCHILL’S OWN wife, Clementine, worried lest the United States abandon its “Germany First” policy. In fact, Clemmie sent Winston cable after cable, while he was staying at the White House, expressing her abiding fear that, in the aftermath of the massive German surrender in Tunisia—with the numbers of German and Italian prisoners reportedly mounting by the hour—the United States might consider the campaign at an end, and choose to redirect its primary efforts to the Pacific. “I’m so afraid the Americans will think that a Pacific slant is to be given to the next phase of the war,” she wrote him on May 13. “Surely the liberation of Europe must come first,” she confided. And in a PS she added that she’d just heard of the “terrific” RAF bomber raid on Duisburg, in the Ruhr. “Do re-assure me that the European front will take 1st place all the time,” she begged.1
Winston, however, was Winston: endowed with inspirational intellectual energy and romantic imagination yet burdened, too, by an often fatal penchant for peripheral rather than direct, frontal attack. It was a tendency that went back to his justifiable indignation as an infantry battalion commander in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I before the Battle of the Somme, and the bloodbath he witnessed on the plains of France.
Churchill’s alternative—his Dardanelles landings—had proven just as futile as Allied offensives on the Western Front in World War I, however. There had simply been no easy military alternative to frontal attacks in World War I in the West—attacks that did, when no diplomatic solution could be found, ultimately decide the outcome once U.S
. troops were committed to battle in France in 1918. Certainly the Prime Minister was fully entitled to ask his own chiefs of staff and then the Combined Chiefs to explore other scenarios before confirming the Casablanca decision to pursue a cross-Channel invasion—but that was not how Churchill presented his case at the White House.
Nor was it the case the next morning, when the first so-called Trident meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff opened in the Board of Governors Room of the Federal Reserve Building on Constitution Avenue. There, to Admiral Leahy’s disgust, it became clear that an extension of the war in the Mediterranean and the Balkans rather than the agreed assault of northern Europe was no mere Churchillian fantasy. General Brooke, the bespectacled, owlish-looking “strongman” on the British team, announced he was even more opposed to a cross-Channel Second Front in 1944 than Prime Minister Churchill.
Brooke’s apostasy in seeking to overturn the Casablanca agreement on a 1944 Second Front was potentially crippling to the Allied military alliance.
A solitary, self-contained man of incisive mind, Brooke had done his best since succeeding Sir John Dill as British Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1941 to curb the Prime Minister’s penchant for madcap schemes—especially red herrings that detracted from the Allies’ primary strategic effort. Now, however, as CIGS, Brooke was supporting Churchill’s alternative strategy.
How, though, the U.S. chiefs countered, would an as-yet-unplanned invasion of the mainland of Italy, the Balkans, and Greek islands miraculously lead to the collapse or defeat of the Third Reich?
In hindsight—given German determination to pursue the war to the bitter end—it couldn’t. But in truth that was not Brooke’s real reason, in May 1943, for backing rather than dissuading the Prime Minister. The fact was, despite the success of the Western Allies in North Africa, he too had lost faith in the essential feasibility of a Second Front in 1944.
Brooke had commanded heavy British artillery in World War I and large numbers of troops in France early in World War II—command that had ended in tearful defeat. The humiliation of British evacuation first at Dunkirk and then Brest, Cherbourg, and Saint-Nazaire in 1940, on top of the complete collapse of the French armies, had cut to his heart. Half-French himself, he simply lacked belief that an Allied cross-Channel invasion could ever succeed. The Wehrmacht drubbing given to Operation Jubilee, Mountbatten’s August 1942 mini-rehearsal at Dieppe for an eventual cross-Channel assault landing, had in Brooke’s view proved the point. The German massacre of an entire Canadian brigade on the beaches of the little French seaport was clearly a beach too far, given the literally dozens of tough Wehrmacht divisions stationed across northern Europe to repel such an attempted invasion—including panzer divisions.
The result was that in Washington, General Brooke exuded not energy—which at least his Prime Minister did—but a kind of dour, Northern Irish Protestant skepticism amounting to obstructionism. Not only about plans, moreover, but about people.
At Casablanca he had gotten a very poor impression of General Eisenhower as a fighting commander—blind to the way the young Allied commander in chief was not only learning on the job, but inventing a new kind of coalition command that might be messy and might result in many an upset or failure, but which brought together the collective power of Western arms—naval, air, and army—in a way that even the most disciplined of German troops could not stand up to, in the end. Even news of the surrender of General von Arnim together with many hundreds of thousands of Axis troops at Cape Bon, when he received it immediately after the meeting in the President’s study, failed to change Brooke’s mind, or convince him the Allies would ever be ready to fight whole German armies in northern France, unless the German government collapsed, as in 1918.
Wearing his trademark round black spectacles, Brooke sat in his chair at the Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting the next day, May 13, 1943—his thick black mustache and slightly hooked nose giving him a fierce, intimidating countenance. He listened silently as Admiral Leahy was first acknowledged as the chairman of the proceedings and then read aloud to the meeting the U.S. chiefs’ opening paper. This was titled “A Global Strategy, A Memorandum by the United States Chiefs of Staff.” Copies of the document, moreover, had been handed to all the chiefs around the table. Looking through the document as Leahy spoke, Brooke hated it.
Word for word the document set down in typed script the strategy the President had outlined the day before at the White House. The “concept of defeating Germany first involves making a determined attack against Germany on the Continent at the earliest practicable date,” the U.S. chiefs’ document stated, “and we consider that all proposed operations in Europe should be based primarily on the basis of contributions to that end.”
Lest there be any misunderstanding on this score, Admiral Leahy spelled it out in the simplest of sentences: “It is the opinion of the United States Chiefs of Staff that a cross-Channel invasion of Europe is necessary to an early conclusion of the war with Germany.”2
Not to be outdone, General Brooke responded by handing across the table copies of the British chiefs of staff counterpaper—a paper that Brooke then read aloud to the meeting.
Entitled “Conduct of the War in 1943–44,” the document was three times as long as Leahy’s. In it the British chiefs argued that Italy might not surrender after the fall of Sicily, or by the threat of Allied bombing.
In order to achieve Italy’s capitulation, the British paper contended, there would probably be need for “amphibious operations against either the Italian islands or the mainland.” This “continuance of Mediterranean operations” would, “of course have repercussions elsewhere and will affect BOLERO,” the cross-Channel assault, as well as operations in the Pacific, the document allowed. However, the fruits of Italian collapse would, the British chiefs argued, be worth the cost of delaying the cross-Channel invasion for several years, for it would make possible “increasing supplies to the Balkan resistance groups, and by speeding up our aid to Turkey.”3
Silence again ensued—the two Allies at a strategic stalemate.
After a pause, General Marshall, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, pointed out that, as the President had said the day before, there was no reason to venture into southern Europe at all. The Ploesti refineries, in Romania, which provided Germany’s all-important oil supplies, should certainly be bombed by long-distance B-25 and B-17 bombers, operating from the Mediterranean. In fact, Marshall continued, the use of vastly superior and constantly increasing Allied air power “might enable us to economize in the use of ground forces in the Mediterranean Area,” since footling amphibious and ground operations would not achieve more than local advantage—while merely delaying the Allies’ main offensive capability. The Allies would then “deeply regret not being ready to make the final blow against Germany, if the opportunity presented itself, by reason of having dissipated ground forces in the Mediterranean Area.”4
Again, there was silence.
Brooke countered that Allied air power was all very well, as in bombing the Ploesti oil refineries, “but this must be examined in relation to the whole picture of knocking Italy out of the war.”
To this Marshall delivered the stunning rejoinder: namely that the aim of the “Europe First” strategy had never been to focus on Italy—Germany’s junior partner in crime. The objective was to defeat Nazi Germany, their real adversary. Thus, rather than dispersing their forces in subsidiary ventures, he rebuked Brooke, “we should direct our attention to knocking Germany out of the war.”5
The first formal Combined Chiefs of Staff (COS) meeting of the Trident Conference now turned into a free-for-all, as General Brooke, under attack, revealed more and more of his hand—this time claiming that by dumping the Casablanca agreement they would help Stalin—for if Italy fell, the Germans would be compelled to deny reinforcements to their Eastern Front and instead occupy and defend the Italian mainland, as well as defending the Balkans and Aegean Islands, just as they had done when compelled
to send German reinforcements to Tunisia. Hitler would thus be able to provide “20 [percent] less on the Russian front,” aiding the Soviets.
This aspect might well be so, Leahy, Marshall, and King accepted. But would not the mere threat of Allied invasion compel Hitler to station that number of divisions in Italy and the Balkans—much as he had stationed four hundred thousand German troops in Norway, and twenty-five divisions in France? Brooke’s other claim, namely that successful Allied amphibious operations to seize yet more Mediterranean islands and occupy the Italian mainland would then provide a springboard from which to mount an attack on southern France, sounded equally irrelevant. Since when had southern France been deemed a way of “knocking Germany out of the war”?
Pushed against the ropes, General Brooke was thus driven to confess his deeper fear: that, unless fighting continued in the Mediterranean, “no possibility of an attack into [northern] France would arise”6—for it would surely fail. Even if Allied troops succeeded in achieving a beachhead across the English Channel, the subsequent battle or campaign in northern France, he believed, would be a disaster—for the Allies. Even after a bridgehead had been established, “we could get no further,” he predicted. “The troops employed would be for the most part inexperienced.” With only fifteen to twenty U.S. and British divisions, the Bolero operation would be “too small and could not be regarded in the same category as the vast Continental armies which were counted in 50’s and 100’s of divisions” in the previous war.7
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